Farage could walk away from Reform – this is how

is a journalist and author of the forthcoming book The Rise of Reform Welcome to The Fight for the Right, The i Paper’s new opinion series exploring the ideas, personalities and parties battling to shape the right of British politics. • The Tories’ birthplace reveals a party fighting for its life Nigel Farage is sitting on a powder keg. His party is filled with conflicting personalities, while he navigates a difficult media environment and a constantly shifting political landscape. Beyond all of that are the weaknesses of Farage himself. He has repeatedly fallen out with once allies, some of whom have gone on to cause him problems. Most prominent in this category is Rupert Lowe, who has created his own rival populist party, Restore. While Lowe’s organisation polls lowly nationally, they are still pulling almost exclusively from Reform’s voting base. Meanwhile, within Reform, there is a clash of not only personalities but visions of what the party should be. There are the “Sensibles”, usually ex-Tories like Robert Jenrick and Danny Kruger. These people want Reform to replace the Tories as the natural party of the centre-right by simply doing all the things they feel the Conservative Party should have done with their 14 years of power. They are up against the “Zianists”, those who want Reform to reclaim the populist right mantle from Restore, led at least nominally at this stage by Zia Yusuf, the party’s home affairs spokesperson. This is part of the backdrop that haunts Reform. People within the party can set up rival power bases using social media, while Farage’s erstwhile allies can battle him using the same channels. All while the centre-right media in Britain sees one last chance to save the Conservative Party at Reform’s expense, talking up Kemi Badenoch as if she is the messiah. Yet it’s worth pointing out that Farage has been written off many times before. After he failed to win his parliamentary seat in 2010, many said Ukip were a flash in the pan that had failed to make good. Except, Ukip soon became a huge influence on British politics. Without the threat they posed to the Conservative Party, it is extremely unlikely Cameron would have committed to an EU referendum. When Farage failed to win his seat in 2015 and resigned as Ukip leader, many said that was the end of his political career. The next year he played a key role in the EU referendum. In 2019, when he had his troops stand aside for Johnson’s Tories to “get Brexit done”, it was assumed by most pundits in Britain that Farage had reached the end of his political road. And yet, in the 2020s already, he has managed to play a major part in creating a new party, Reform UK, and watch it go ahead in the polls solidly for a year and a half under his leadership, all while gaining thousands of local seats and being the biggest news story of this parliament. I spent a lot of time myself with not only Reform MPs and senior figures, but with local Reform activists and candidates for a book soon to be published, called The Rise of Reform: The inside story of Britain’s political disruptors. That research leads me to believe that thoughts around Reform being finished might turn out to be wide of the mark. Certainly, the next year is vital to Reform. I think we will know in 12 months’ time for certain whether Reform are finished, or if they can still threaten the hegemony of the big two parties in a real way. Here’s what to watch for. It will have gone wrong for Reform over the next year if they find themselves consistently third in the polls, with Labour and the Tories battling for top spot. More than even that, if Reform do relatively poorly in the 2027 local elections – and particularly if the Tories do well – this will be a sign of true and verifiable Reform decline. Basically, if the Tories can demonstrate that they are the leading centre-right party in Britain again, both in the polls and on the ground, Reform would be in very serious trouble. It’s worth looking at the best-case scenario for Reform as well. You will know that it has gone all right for them when we get to the end of summer 2027 if Reform are still second or first consistently in the polls and they keep doing well in local elections. A realistic scenario is that there is a second Clacton by-election this spring and Farage wins it by a mile. Then, Reform do as well in the 2027 local elections as they have done in 2025 and 2026. If they do so, and particularly if the Tories perform very poorly once again, Reform could end up as the largest party in Britain at local level, with more councillors than anyone else. That would be a hard thing for anyone thinking Reform are about to implode to simply wave away. Momentum might well be on their side again after the 2027 locals. If things go the wrong way for Reform, Farage walking away at some point over the next year could happen. It is worth pondering what would come next for Reform if that were to occur. Farage remains the thing that binds the party together. With him gone, the Sensibles and the Zianists could tear each other – and the party – apart. The one thing that has kept Reform together to this point is loyalty to Farage. One wonders what the glue that holds Reform together might be if Nigel Farage stepped out of the picture. Farage is a divisive figure among voters and the questions around the £5 million refuse to go away, but even with that in mind, he is probably the one person, at least for the time being, who can bring as many people into the Reform tent as are there right now. The party seems able to hold down somewhere between a quarter and a fifth of the vote across the UK, even in a time of crisis. While someone else might be able to retain this slice of the electorate, Farage still seems like the most capable in this regard. But his greatest strength is also his biggest weakness. He has built a successful party around himself, but expanding it means bringing in politicians with ambitions, loyalties and ideas of their own. The people he needs to make Reform a credible party of government will also expect a say in how it is run. For now, the prospect of power gives them a reason to swallow their differences and accept his authority. The real test will come when Farage has to disappoint them — or when the promise of victory begins to fade. But don’t bet against Farage just yet. He has a way of exceeding expectations. He may well do it one more time.